On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:18:30 -0600, Scott Ferrin
wrote:

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 16:45:16 -0700, "Tarver Engineering"
wrote:

That would seem to be the nature of Lockheed unflyable entry in the
competition to build a prototype ATF, none of it mattered.


At that point in the competition (two designs chosen of seven paper
designs) unless the USAF did a lot of inhouse simulation/studies/ etc.
about the only thing they have to go on is the data the manufacturers
submit with their proposals.

Excuse me, but this must be some sort of a time warp that I didn't
live through. As I recall the events, at the end of Dem/Val, the two
manufacturers went through FSD and each produced a couple of flying
prototypes. The requirement was that both manufacturers fly with both
engines--P & W and GE. Avionics demo was left up to the bidders, with
Northrop opting to fly a system on board and Lockheed choosing to
breadboard on a proxy. It certainly wasn't a paper fly-off.


Did the USAF (the people deciding who
would build the prototypes) know the Lockheed entry as presented
wouldn't fly? Who knows? Obviously Lockheed themselves didn't know
it or maybe they thought they could put a lot of spin on their
presentation.

Spin on paper? They flew prototypes. Admittedly prototypes aren't
production aircraft, but they are "proof of concept" demonstrators.

Looking at the two proposals they chose (Lockheed and
Northrop) it's obvious that experience in stealth was a very high
priority.

Stealth was a high priority, but Northrop was rolling the B-2 out the
door at Pico Rivera at the time and Lockheed had ended production of
F-117 ten years earlier.


Certainly neither company had any recent experience turning
out a lot of high end fighters.

(That would be discounting several thousand F-5A through F aircraft by
Northrop as well as developing YF-17 and participating in
fuselage/tail section production of the F-18 contract.)

With that in mind the two most
logical choices would have been Lockheed and Northrop- exactly who
they chose. An interesting sidenote is that GD was third and they
also have been associated with stealth from way back (the
A-12/Kingfisher competition). Boeing was fourth with damn near no
stealth experience (in the white world anyway) and the historical king
of fighter producers McD was 5th.

In 1987-88 when I was at Northrop, the two bidders were in
consortia--Northrop was teamed with MacAir while Lockheed was
partnered with Boeing and GD. There certainly wasn't a five contractor
competition in Dem/Val and there wasn't in FSD either. Maybe if we
went back to choosing whether to respond to the ATF RFP....

To go from supplying the USAF with
their premier fighter for the last forty or so years (F-4/F-15) to
placing FIFTH in the competition to build a new fighter suggests that
though the USAF wanted it all, aerodynamic performance took a distant
second place behind stealth. It might even be that the air force
*did* know Lockheed's entry was questionable aerodynamically but
stealth was important enough to accept it.

None of your statement tracks with my experience in the program, but
maybe you had a better seat.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8